Survata Tests Yahoo’s 30 Logos | Hacker News Reader

Survata Tests Yahoo’s 30 Logos

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29 pointschadyj23 comments

> "A logo is really a visual manifestation of all the complex ideas, values and people that fuel a company"

You lost me here.

A logo is a marketing tool. What part of the yellow and red double arches says "hamburgers"? What part of a weird green mermaid-thing says "coffee"? What part of staggered striped blue lines say... actually nevermind, that one actually does say "IBM", literally.

A logo is more frequently abstract than it is descriptive, and the more iconic you go the less they have to do with the company's business or even its people. How does an apple with a chunk taken out of it represent high-end consumer electronics?

How do concentric red circles describe "bargain department store"? How does a strange six-pointed star describe "Wal-Mart", or any of its values, products, businesses, or people? Exactly what does the iconic cursive Coca-Cola script represent? Is the flowing script supposed to represent refreshment and thirst-quenching?

A logo's primary purpose is to be immediately recognizable and indelibly associated with a brand. That brand may evoke lifestyles, ideas, values, and people - but I assure you the logo has next to no role in that. Shrewd, persistent, on-message marketing does that. In some circles Wal-Mart's brand has become associated with gross corporate abuse, representing all that is wrong with greed and capitalism - I don't believe Wal-Mart's logo had anything to do with this branding (or rather, mis-branding).

This is a tempest in a teapot. Disregarding the fact that Yahoo openly acknowledged this as more of a plaything than a serious attempt at rebranding, the logo really doesn't have that much to do with the sort of brand Yahoo wants to build for itself, or the values and ideas they seek to represent.

"What part of the yellow and red double arches says "hamburgers"? What part of a weird green mermaid-thing says "coffee"? What part of staggered striped blue lines say... actually nevermind, that one actually does say "IBM", literally."

There is, though, a reason why the IBM logo is blue and blocky, not yellow and arch-y - same as there's a reason the mermaid-thing isn't a geometric-thing and is green-on-brown not red-on-yellow.

There's a language that images and colors speak - not in specific terms like "hamburger", "coffee", or "computer" - but in impressions and feelings like "dependable" or "fun" or "earthy". I don't know enough about that language to speak it fluently, but I do usually "get the gist of what they're saying" in a well designed logo(/logo-type/website/landing-page/ … ), and I've worked with great designers who can explain exactly what the message they're sending with their design is - and follow along and agree with their choices. I suspect your "next to no role" in evoking feelings and emotions is significantly undervaluing the power of good graphic designers. It's by no means a replacement for "shrewd, persistent, on-message marketing", it's certainly something that can both help and hinder those efforts.

If you let the public "choose" your logo, you're choosing to accept your logo will send whatever message _they_ want it to send. That's quite likely not going to be the best fit with your business plan or the roadmap for your company and products moving into the future.

I agree design language matters - don't take me as anti-designer. I believe that this article severely and massively overstates it, though. Effective design hints at the intended message (sometimes, though as you get more iconic this design message becomes more and more abstract), it does not build the brand.

Take Whole Foods as an example - the typography, colors, and accents on the logo all refer to a desired corporate identity, but it would IMO be severely overstating the case to say that this is the embodiment of the company's brand, as the article seems to be claiming for Yahoo. The logo is but one tiny part of a huge puzzle, the vast majority of which lies firmly in the realm of marketing and branding.

Honestly, IMO Yahoo could change their logo to nearly any of the crazy options that they played with, and their brand would not be measurably worse off (or better off). Once you move away from "Bob's Burger Palace" with a giant neon burger for a logo, you're getting into territory where the perceptual impact of your logo becomes more and more esoteric, hard to measure, and subtle. I sincerely doubt anyone looks at the Yahoo logo and goes "those disjoint serif letter sure sound like a fun and dynamic website!"

There are good logos and bad logos, IMO the notion that logo design and measurably influence brand perception (especially when you get into extremely abstract logos like Yahoo, Apple, or even Google) is true, but severely overstated by some designers. It would seem to me that a successful logo is less about messaging and more about its longevity and ability to be iconic.

If you took some text and wrote it IBM-style, it would still be visibly IBM. If you took the red-yellow combination and put it on something without the arches, it would still be visibly McDonald's. The mermaid figure that represents Starbucks is so out there, and the green so consistently applied to all of its branding, that it can stand alone without the name of the company and still be instantly recognizable. Those factors are IMO far, far more important to a logo than the extremely abstract ideas and values they represent.

Quoting from TFA:

    This is the kind of nonsense that results from 
    fundamentally misunderstanding what a logo is.

Rephrasing:

    This is the kind of [blog post] that results from
    fundamentally misunderstanding what a 
    [marketing stunt] is [and then proceeds to market/promote
    the thing about which it's complaining].

After looking at some of the logos, it was very clear that Yahoo was playing around and not seriously testing logos...

They may have included non-serious candidates as part of the experiment design, e.g. for control purposes, or simply to make up numbers.

This "church of design" approach to criticism is intense. The idea that you can't violate the sanctity of a logo by playing with it is refuted every day by Google and their doodles.

Google and their doodles are part of their identity. The fact that it changes, and the way it changes affects people's perception of who google is, and their fundamental philosophy and approach to things. This idea of a changing logo was pioneered by Frank Olinsky and his MTV identity work. The change is part of the logo, not a search for a new/better one.

On the other hand, "not violating the sanctity of a logo" says something else about a company. Something a company may desire. Dependability. Stability. Reliability. (but also potentially dated, old fashioned, stagnated)

Neither of these things has much relevance to the point of the article. The point of the article is something like this:

Imagine you go on a date, and during the course of the date you try on 30 different personalities, and at the end you ask the girl (or guy) to take a survey on which personality she (or he) liked best- In order to determine what kind of personality you should have.

Wouldn't you think that would come off kind of fake? Who you are, or who you should be, how you should dress, the way you talk, this is not something you can get out of a survey of what people think of you while you adopt a range of different reinventions of yourself.

But Yahoo never took a survey to see what people liked. Someone else took a survey. This is more like you declared a "silly hat month" and wore 30 different silly hats to work each day and someone at another office took a poll to see which one people liked best.

Right, but if Google had played with their logo for 30 days, and then stopped, would it really be any different from if they'd never played with their logo ever?

Well, I'm only commenting on what I think the point of the article is. On the other hand, that point is undermined by comments in this thread about what the actual intent was. If the intent was just to be playful, (like say, the episode of Doctor Who in which the Time Lady Romana tries on different "bodies" before settling on a new actress to play her) then that's not at all like the scenario I described. It's more like dying your hair a different color each day on a bet.

However, to some people, (the author specifically) it's /come off/ as the situation described. So, without really seeing more evidence, I can tentatively conclude "a swing and a miss". But I can't fault them for trying.

> This “face-off chart” in particular has all the charm of pulling out a spreadsheet on a date.

What's wrong with data? The author doesn't actually explain how it's certain that there are no metrics which could act as a reasonable proxy for the quality of a logo's "visual manifestation of all the complex ideas, values and people that fuel a company".

Instead of a logo imagine it was a word or phrase that encapsulated the complex ideas and values of Yahoo. Does data drive or validate the meaning? Can it? Design has its own inherent semantics and semiotics in much the same way language does.

You can take measurements with respect to particular objectives. For example, does product description A or product description B lead to higher sales? I agree you can't measure something as vague as "complex ideas and values", but you can certainly find more concrete things that are quantifiable that are decent proxies.

This seems to be a re-occurring misunderstanding. The 30 logos are not candidates. They are not potential logos. They are "our way of having some fun while honoring the legacy of our present logo" [1] and were used to get people used to the idea of change. There were horrible logos in there - pretty sure the people making them even knew that. The new logo, as it will be revealed tonight at midnight EST, will be the actual logo - everything else was tongue in cheek. It has people talking about Yahoo. It has people wondering what the actual new logo will be.

The Survata survey is a third party company making statistics for something that will give them self promotion - nothing wrong with that, but that is what it is.

[1] http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/57582020969/kicking-off-30-days...

I don't know why design snobbery grates on me so much but it does. Take for example Coca Cola. They have been around for 100+ years and their logo has evolved over that time [1]. Did anyone care? NO. Did they care when they changed the actual product (New Coke). YES. [2]

First off, this is Yahoo! and I'm sure most rockstar designers are too cool to work at/for them anyway.

Second, plenty of established brands change their logos slightly. Big deal. All these non-candidates were still purple, still a wordmark (or whatever you designers insist a "logo of letters" be called).

Third, if they want to show off a bunch of candidates or non-candidates–again–big deal. In what way could such a move possibly hurt their actual usage/bottom line (seriously, I want to know).

It's funny how much we talk about disruption in the entrepreneurial space–yet, when it comes to design the process and tenets are too sacred and established to question. As if logo design has been around for millennia.

[1] http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/125/history-of-coca-cola-logo.htm...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke

As others have pointed out, this is not really an experiment for Yahoo to figure out which logo works best. It is just an attempt to shake things up, trying to appeal to the modern internet users. You can perhaps see this more in the line of kinda-Google-doodle-but-not-really

Companies redesign logos all the time and it's highly doubtful all of them have endless angst over representing the gestalt of their company values to their customers with it. This piece reeks of self-important design student.

If there's nothing approaching "angst" over a redesign - why aren't they just sticking with the old design?

I am thoroughly convinced that Yahoo! is purposefully putting out 30 crappy logos so that the stunning one they've spent considerable time and money on and that they're releasing tomorrow will just seem that much better.

This was my hypothesis, too. I'm disappointed.

Put the logo dispute aside, any great products from Yahoo delivered recently?

All I see is good & old ones get closed.

Heck, Yahoo China simply decided to close all together.

http://cn.yahoo.com

Not a logo. A logotype.

Logotype is a subset of Logo.

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